Imagining/hoping that the takeaway from Banned Books Week won’t be “only 11 ppl are behind most book challenges?” but that despite how unpopular book bans are there is also an accelerating mission to destroy public libraries as an institution
Comments
Log in with your Bluesky account to leave a comment
As someone who has been a librarian for years and who just started in a new system, it’s a very real problem. My previous employer has been lucky to have the support of communities that love the library as much as they do. Where I am now has had so many challenges in the past /1
to the point that the whole system was nearly shut down. At the end of the day, libraries live and die on community support. It’s not enough to stand your ground against patrons. It can not matter what resources you provide, or if you have a balanced collection. Censorship is always a possibility.
Exactly. Those eleven people would still be anonymous and largely ignored without the context of a full scale nationally coordinated attack on libraries and school systems funded by deep pockets on the right.
Yeah, like, on the one hand it's good to know it's such a small number of people, but on the other hand those people are having an outsized effect and fanning the flames of book banning and it's not good to minimize that!
This is great advice! Our local library boards seem to be doing okay at the moment but I’d love advice on how to help besieged ones from afar, as a non-local.
I would say "Help keep local special interest groups informed" -- The venn diagram of SIGs and library boards is sometimes completely disjoint and that really harms information flow. Example: Reaching out to a local gay bar / drag scene to discuss LGBT books that are under seige in their libraries.
I think there should be some kind of obligatory limit. Like, you can challenge 2 books a year. If you attempt to challenge more than 2 a year you get cut off for 5 years. Choose wisely.
In Austin they talk about how the homeless people make it dangerous like they’re not there using the internet for jobs, or just avoiding exposure to the elements. It’s sad
Comments
Damn autocorrect.
Might work.
Seriously though, library boards and whatnot to whom these people bray their complaints need to put the phrase “No, fuck off” into their vocabularies.
I’m not sharp enough to capture all this in a skeet. Hope the many competing considerations are understood.